"If I am alive" Aditi Machado begins. "If I am thinking / nothing has stopped". In this selection of three poems, Machado burrows into the paired binary of thinking and feeling. On the one hand, cogito ergo sum. On the other hand, "I feel that I am happening / in a sleeve." To perform this investigation, Machado turns inward, and the space that the turning creates and navigates is sacred. With echoes of Blake, Machado moves toward the void of the god word she finds within: the word that cannot be spoken, the word that cannot speak, the word that cannot help itself but to create ripples of language that emanate from it: "Which is to say if the god word was denied to speaking, it was not / to thinking or feeling or tapestry." Because, of course, there is no difference between thinking and feeling. Both are functions that occur in and are processed by the brain. Their wedding is inevitable, and so "[b]lessed is the heart. / Blessed is my gethsemane // of florid logic."

"According to the meditative array of information in Aspiration, to examine one is to examine many, “a unit is a unit composed of many things. Interest signaling among the aggregates”. And so what is the lyric if not that unimaginable plural of I! as Creeley put it. (Is not the lyric a part of We?) But not only, for that is far too pithy a summation and, ultimately, toothless on its own. The lyric is conjoined to both forms of such existence as much as it is anything..."